Transcription
I do not believe that the problems of society will be fixed by politicians alone. I've never seen so many CEOs that pardon the language, I've never seen so many CEOs that pardon the language, I've never seen so many CEOs that pardon the language, seem chicken shit. We have the most prosperous nation world's ever seen, the most innovation world's ever seen, but we should acknowledge the problems and try to fix them.
- Jamie Dimon, welcome to the "Axios Show."
- Happy to be here. So I really want to focus on the sort of the future according to Jamie Diamond, through your eyes. Running a business and sort of studying the world right now, I can't recall, certainly in my lifetime, this much risk. It feels like there's risk everywhere, whether it's Ukraine, whether it's in Iran, whether it's private credit, whether it's the entire political system, whether it's debt. Am I right?
- Partially. I would put some of the stuff, private credit, enough stuff is kind of normal risk. I do think the war in Ukraine, the war in Iran, the terrorism around the world, the oral danger with China. I do think there's more geopolitical risk than we've seen since World War II. That's absolutely correct.
So when we look at that, can it play out in a way that's good? I think like in the Middle East, it's possible they end up with a situation with a higher chance with long-term peace because Saudi Arabia wants it, UAE wants it, America wants it, Israel wants it, and we've destroyed, for the most part, some of the really bad proxy actors there, so maybe it's a higher chance. In the short run, it does create more risk.
Engaging with China, we are engaging again. I think we have a very good hand. We have all the food, war, and energy we need. Most prosperous nation, best military. They've done a great job on certain technologies, but their GDP per person is $15,000. Their neighborhood is very complex. And they pissed them all off: Korea, South Korea, Vietnam, Philippines, Australia, Japan, Indonesia. It's a complex part of the world.
- Pissed off our fair share of people.
- Yeah, we have, but we still are the bastion of freedom for the world.
We had an interview with Vladimir Zelensky today, President of Ukraine, and he said one of the big winners of the Iran War is undoubtedly Russia. I think you and I would agree that China's been a big beneficiary of our war in Iran. It is a war of choice. Are we giving, are we handing sort of this golden opportunity to China and to Russia?
- Yeah, I would step back on that one a little bit when you say it's a war of choice. I've heard a lot of people say there was no imminent threat, and the threat means that it hasn't happened yet, the bad thing hasn't happened. They've been killing people around the world for 45 plus years. They've killed a lot of Americans. They funded not just Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis. They have terrorist cells here. They were about to get their ballistic missiles, I think you just found out, can go almost 3,000 miles now. They never gave up nuclear. They were bad. So I don't look at this like, does it create all this uncertainty? Absolutely. Does it create more short-term risk for the oil prices? Absolutely. I'm praying it ends well. I don't know everything the American government knows. I don't know if you know, the military has been planning things like this extensively in a lot of detail, so they know more than we do. They have more plans than we do, and I literally hope it turns out well and that somehow we get peace in the Middle East permanently, in the Middle East permanently. But having those folks, their throat on the Straits of Hormuz and funding all these proxy wars, why the Western world put up these proxy wars for 45 years is kind of beyond me. I don't know what all the facts were about why now, and I agree with you, it creates risk.
And so what, when you think about domestic risk, like what is the biggest domestic risk to keeping this country rocking?
- And I always say that there's no divine, even America has no divine right to success. And we have the Constitution, which is extraordinary. That's the embodiment of values, so it's the legal embodiment of freedom of enterprise, liberty, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, equal opportunity. That's what that is, and those values are actually the things that are strong for this America, including God, family, country, work ethic. I think we've gotten a little bit soft. I think we made a huge mistake in not teaching this much more in the schools. Did America have failures? Absolutely. Should we look at that and tear down what this unbelievable country's done? Absolutely not. So the real risk is our heart, our soul, our grit, our courage. That is the actual real risk because that will drive the economy. America's military strength is predicated upon America's economic strength. Our economic strength is predicated in keeping this wonderful system going, fixing it where it did something wrong, but there's too much today, like just tearing it down. It quite bothers me that we don't celebrate the values of virtues, particularly in this 250th year of the anniversary. So yeah, I am worried about that. It is a troubled time, but we're gonna get through this too.
- You mentioned artificial intelligence. You've said you're net optimistic. You think it'll be a net positive. You're also very realistic that it's gonna cause some level of job displacement. You've also heard the bigger debate. You have some of the creators who talk about this thing doing some pretty scary stuff that probably explains why the polls are not great for artificial intelligence. What is your single greatest fear about AI that it could do?
- Well, I'm gonna stay away from the military stuff. I think it would be cyber. Our biggest risk here is cyber. For America, and even these wars, there's a cyber component to this, and I think AI makes cyber, these agents make cyber far worse. And so that might be the biggest one.
- You've been briefed on the new Anthropic technology. It's scary. We should be honest. They're talking about it being so good that they feel like there could be a catastrophic cyber attack this year, and that there's no way you could defend it. That's crazy.
- Remember, it was built to defend, but it's a weapon that could be used to attack. They're not used to attack, and I've been worried about this for, I've written about it for years that cyber is huge, and it's getting worse every single year. Now, of course, America's got unbelievable cyber capabilities too, so if anything closes down part of America, you can assume we'll close down part of our adversaries, if not more. But I do think people, it makes people worried about the job part. And so while maybe in the long run, I really think some developed nations, people might be working three and a half or four days a week, living longer, curing cancers, no airplane crashes, no car crashes. That's unbelievable. But if it happens too fast, what do you do? And that's why my view, like I do at JP Morgan, okay, anticipate what might be a risk. We don't know, but not knowing and thinking it's possible, what are you gonna do? So JP Morgan is gonna, and we always did this, but we're gonna really double down, re-skill, retrain, relocate, use AI to serve a client unabashedly, but make sure we keep taking care of our people. And I think the country can do that, done the right way.
- You and I talk to a ton of CEOs, you more than I. I've yet to talk to anyone who's not planning to cut a significant number of jobs in the next two years as a result of this. I agree, it could be great in the long run, but shouldn't we be more honest with the American people that it could be really, really painful?
- I think, but remember, so there are shortages in tons of jobs today. There are blue collar, but there are hard jobs. I remember going to a place that taught kids or even people who are 45 years old, how to manage advanced manufacturing tools. We call it a blue collar job, but you're basically managing a computer that manages the tool. We have jobs everywhere like that, and we need more welders, more electricians, more plumbers, more. And these become very sophisticated jobs. And then high schools, community colleges, unions do a very good job at this training people. So I kind of agree with you. I think if we kind of get our act together and plan for this, we can handle the negative outcome. The other thing is, remember, there are a lot of things that AI will barely affect. So it is like, it's gonna affect every job. It's gonna affect a lot of jobs. What it does with government jobs, I don't know. Police, firemen, I don't know. I mean, so we should take a deep breath.
- You're an optimist, obviously, but you also talk to the Sam Altmans, the Elons of the world. They talk about, like even P-doom, this idea of the percentage chance that this ends catastrophically.
- Well, they're talking about something else too.
- They're talking about the the ability of this technology to move outside the control of humans and do something. When they say P-doom, they're literally talking about destroying us as a species. Do you have any fear of that or is that heightened?
- No, I don't have a fear of that yet.
- None?
- Well, I read the same stuff you read, and I do think you need some kind of guardrails around it. I think we're also very smart, we'll probably build some guardrails. We do a lot of work in that. I don't see that personally, but you could come up with Odyssey 2000, see that maybe how can lose control a little bit.
You know that people are down on big business, they're down on media, they're down on government. There's been almost just like institutional decay. The one group of people they seem to trust are the people running their specific business. I feel like never in my life have the employees and the public needed to hear more from CEOs, and yet it seems like in this environment, I've never seen so many CEOs that, pardon the language, seem chicken shit to speak any truth internally or externally. Why? This has been going on for a long time. I don't trust doctors, trust my doctor. I don't like politicians, I like my congressman. I don't like banks, I love my bank. JP Morgan is very trusted by our clients, so it's not true that it's not trusted. It's very trusted, in fact, more trusted than people think. And I think that you just said it, inside a company, these CEOs are trusted people. They're not distrusted, not distrusted by the local communities. Most of 'em are very pro-government, pro-help, pro-community, pro-America. But if you go back in history, CEOs didn't comment on. I get asked by, of course, all my Democratic friends, you gotta say something. I said, you didn't ask me to say something every time I didn't agree with Biden or Obama. CEOs aren't used to commenting on every single policy that comes out there. But I do agree with you on this, and this is a major point to me, we, business, made a mistake by not getting more involved earlier. I do not believe that the problems of society will be fixed by politicians alone. will be fixed by politicians alone. That's not an insult to politicians. Most of the really good ones, they want help to figure things out, and we business kind of stepped back. That's what happened in Europe where the political leadership class became a permanent political leadership class, and I think it ended up being a mistake. And so I do agree with that point that we should step forward and do things that are good for the country. Like John F. Kennedy said, don't ask what the country could do for you, ask what you could do for the country, and we gotta have a little bit more of that spirit.
- But isn't that silence coming from fear? They just fear that Trump's gonna kick the hell out of 'em or not give him a deal.
- There may be some of that, but that was true. I don't know, that was true under all presidents. They didn't speak up. They didn't say, I'm against that policy of this president. So like that, generally, and I understand that, but maybe more should speak up.
- Well, put me in the head, you're a CEO, put, take the viewer inside your head. When you probably look at the president picking on Greenland or bullying Canada or on again, off again tariffs or some of the grifting that you see on the outside, and maybe you wanna say something, how fearful are you to speak the truth?
- I'm not. This is the important part. You can't comment at every little thing, and particularly when people make statements that you know they're gonna modify later. You guys are always chasing your tails because he's like putting out the lure out there, and the press all goes running to it, and they waste so much time. So take immigration. We should all be embarrassed that we now have immigration border control that we didn't have. And when we didn't have it, everyone said, well, it can't be done, it's hard to do. Well, no, actually, it got done damn quickly, and we need border security. We need to decide who enters our country. This has become a major problem around the world, even a bigger problem in Europe because most of the people entering our country here wanna be American citizens. They wanna work. Now that we've done that, the BRT's always supported a path to citizenship for law-abiding folks. I've heard President Trump say that every now and then. Absolutely, he hires some of 'em. DACA stays more merit-based, proper asylum, the things that 80% of Americans say absolutely.
- What is your single biggest disappointment about President Trump?
- I don't wanna say here.
- But doesn't that speak to the fear?
- No, I'm not afraid of it. I just think sometimes he raises some wonderful issues, that things that universities should have been doing a better job at. And but I'm not in favor of taking away all their R&D. And so it's more like that. You gotta slice that catch sometimes.
- But like tariffs or the micromanaging business deals. Do you like that?
- Oh, so tariffs, tariffs are a very small part of our economic relationship with countries. There are some unfair things that countries are doing, and it got the people at the table. I'd like to finish the trade deals. I would do bigger trade deals with people and bigger free trade agreements, which I've heard him say he would do too. So what's the other subject you raised?
- It does seem like you're fearful to. You do have strong opinions. You would assess Joe Biden.
- You gotta go through every single one. I'm happy that the government, more the Department of War, did this deal for MP Materials. If you wanna build rare earths here, we have to do things like that. We give 'em kind of outtake agreements, otherwise it won't work. I haven't evaluated every single deal they did. I think we should be very careful when government gets involved in that, but government's got involved in 0.01% of stuff. It isn't like they got involved in everything. They should be careful. If they're gonna do things like that, it should be very, very well thought through.
I wanna ask a question about the nature of power and this city that I get from a lot of people, and this city that I get from a lot of people. You guys banked Jeffrey Epstein, but you've talked about, you had settlements on that. I don't wanna talk about that. I want to go a layer deeper. You know the powerful, you've banked a lot of these people, you hang out with a lot of these people. It's not just that Jeffrey Epstein was like a bad guy. He was like a burn in hell for eternity, awful human being, and people knew about it, and they still socialized, they still did business with him. Why were people so quick and easy to forgive his sins?
- Well, I don't think they were. In '08, he went to jail for prostitution or something like that, which wasn't considered a terrible crime of some sort if you actually read. And then one of mistakes we made, if actually read what they call it, the pleadings, they were pretty clear that it was much worse than that, but they settled here, but they thought here. And the other thing, you, you guys should be asking is the government knew a lot. Why didn't the government do something about it all those years he was abusing these young women? They knew. But you're right. I think someone wrote a great article too, it was more about his connections, why all these people talk and got together, and it was embarrassing for them. And I don't know why. I think some people, they'll do anything to be in the inside club or something like that, and introducing people. I think some people were, they're innocent, they didn't know. Some knew.
- Some didn't. But if you were in Palm Beach, you knew he was running a Ponzi scheme with these young women coming in and out, and yet people continued to do.
- I agree, I agree. I think is why people like him stay away from someone like me because I would've been like, what the hell are you doing? Remind myself when people, I learned this lesson years ago, if someone calls me, if you called me up and said you want to introduce me to so-and-so to dine and meet, my answer would be to you, here's my telephone number, have 'em call me directly. I wouldn't put up with being introduced to people by people for very reasons like that because I don't wanna be in between or like someone's doing a favor for someone, or sometimes you don't even is true. They're asking me to call that person, or I bring them by. I'm like, well, why?
When you talk about the heart, the beating heart, like that's what will worries you, you gotta keep that alive. Like our politics is fundamentally broken. You and I have talked about it forever. You get this question all the time, I get it. Doesn't the country need a third party, one built on competence, that's pro-business and pro-worker, pro-AI and spreading the benefits, that's tough, but doesn't have to smack talk and make people feel like crap about themselves. Does a country need that?
- Maybe. Every analysis I've seen makes it very hard because of our system. The two parties, if you're gonna run for a president as an independent, you gotta get over 50% electoral votes. That's really hard to do when you got the two parties who are probably gonna get 27%, a minimum, 20%, 7% electoral votes, and then it goes to the House and they decide, and usually they pick whatever party's in charge of the House. But I think you might see that over time.
- Do we need it?
- I don't know if we need it. Leaders come along that are different and change things for people, and we'll see.
- People ask you all the time to run. Would you ever run as a third-party candidate?
- No, I don't think so.
- Would you ever run as a Democrat or Republican?
- It's hard. I'm very hard-pressed to think I should be doing something like that. I love what I do.
- But you know you do get asked all the time, right?
- Yeah, I do get asked. I'm not sure I'm suited to it. I've never been in any campaign at all.
- You've run stuff.
- I've run stuff, yeah, but I'm a banker, I'm a New Yorker. I'm 70 years old. I've had a couple of health problems. It's just probably not me, plus I love what I do. Like from this platform, I can help so many things. Running for president is kind of quixotic. I'd have to give up this to do something as quixotic, so I'm not sure it makes sense. Plus, we're so tough on our politicians. We just annihilate them, and I just think it's wrong. I don't know what to do about that. And then their families for generations almost, and so it's hard to subject your family to that. And anyone who does it, I applaud, but it's hard.
The anger, mistrust of the rich, the powerful seems to keep rising. Do you assume that there'll be an anti-AI, anti-rich and powerful nominee for either the Republican or the Democratic Party in 2028 when you look at the trajectory of things?
- I think it's possible, but unlikely. I think there will be a lot of anti, not anti-AI, but people saying we've gotta control AI, we've gotta make it work for society. That's a perfectly reasonable thing. I think if someone's just anti-AI, I'd think that won't work. I mean, you know how many citizens already use it on Gemini and things like that, and you use it. When I read your stuff, which I read all the time, you acknowledge that you're using AI to get smarter and write things and stuff like that. And the anti-rich thing has been around a long time, and I do understand it because I think separated the two pieces, the piece that's really important is that we have in fact left the lower income folks behind.
Democrats are less popular than the war, less popular than ICE after these raids and shootings in Minneapolis. If there were a stock, you'd probably short 'em. Like what happened?
- I think they just got too far to the left and too anti-business and too lack of common sense. When I look things like, is climate a real issue? Yeah, it is. Did we do a lot of stuff that was intensely stupid? We did, and people know that. Do we overdo DEI in a lot of cases? Yeah, we did, and people know that. We look at, do people believe that Washington is not a swamp? Like who on the show thinks that we give Washington another trillion dollars, that it would be well spent as opposed to go out to their own special interest groups? The inefficiencies they see in the system is extraordinary. The litigation is extraordinary. The deficit, as you already mentioned, is too high. And so I think we made people kinda shocked. But I think what'll happen to the Democratic party, because I speak to my Democratic friends all the time, it won't be that someone figures out what they should do and how they're gonna do it and how they should say it, it'll be when someone comes along who's a leader and says, this is what we're doing. We're not doing that, and we're gonna do this. We're will include, the heart and soul of America, not dragging down America, not blaming successful people for everything, but actually saying, we're gonna fix the schools. We have a problem, we're gonna fix 'em. We're gonna keep the strongest military. We're gonna lift up our lower paid people. Like I would double the earned income tax credit. I think it's to be the best way to get money into the hands of lower income people. I would judge schools on outcomes. Do these kids get jobs and what do the jobs pay? There are solutions to these problems, and we've messed up lots of these policies. Look at our permitting. It's almost a joke now when you try to get something built in a lot of states, and it takes so long. And so let's roll up our sleeves, see what our problems are, attack the problems, and I do think you'll see a hopefully a Democratic leader come forward who does that. And you had that with Clinton, and it isn't that the party figures out the words, it's that there's a person who comes forward, figures out how they wanna lead, and then leads.
It feels like an all hands on deck moment given like the complexities and the different problems that the country has. Not saying they would run for office or what they would do, but who are two or three people that you just wish were actively engaged in fixing America's problems? Who would give people hope and inspiration based on their competence?
- I can't answer that question. I don't wanna answer it. I mentioned the names would be pissed off, plus I'd have to give it some thought. I haven't thought that through. There are people, I remind people, we didn't know about Barack Obama two years before his election. We didn't know about John F. Kennedy, really. We didn't know about Clinton. We didn't know about George W. Bush. We did know about Hillary Clinton and George H.W. Bush. We didn't know about Trump before his first election. We probably didn't believe about Trump before his second election. Someone's gonna come forth, people emerge, they become leaders of a group that take the group, but they have to be a leader. They cannot be pandering to every little part of their party. That does not work. They have to have common sense. They can't just come forward and say, you know, the way I'm going to fix this is I'm gonna have a chip sack, but make it a jobs program. People know that doesn't work. And so if you're gonna do something, do it a way that actually works, explain it to the people. And if you make a mistake, admit you made a mistake and change course.
Three years from now, are you still in your gig here at JP Morgan Chase?
- I don't know, I'll still be here and obviously that's up to the board. I love what I do. I'm devoted to doing it. We've got absolute fabulous team members. And when I move on from CEO, the current plan would be that I stay as executive chairman for a while, so we'll see. You know, David Sinclair and others say that we're five years away from escape velocity. You'll start to reverse age, so if you can hold out for five years, you can do it forever.
- Yeah, that'd be right. I do think the next generation will live to a hundred without all the diseases we've had and stuff like that. They'll be very lucky.
- Will they live far beyond a hundred? Will they live forever?
- I don't know, not forever but longer.
I thought I read somewhere that you wanna start a media company, really?
- Well, look, you uniquely know 'cause I met with these guys when they set up Axios. I would've probably funded the whole thing 'cause outta the respect that I have for you, I would've never have gotten involved in the editorial stuff, but we both agreed it would be bad for you, it'd be bad for JP Morgan 'cause we couldn't advertise in Axios, something like that.
- Would you really do it?
- It'll be something different about policy, but I think educating people is unbelievably important. So I put the education you get in school, I think media is critical. Media teaches everybody. Media's the great influencer. We all wake up in the morning, we read media. I read an awful lot. But if you think of the senators, congressmen, administrative officials, regulators, governors, mayors, and all of their staff, remember, very often it's their staff who's reading to you that is learning to do something. And we have to do a good job at that, and in some ways we haven't. I look at a lot of bad policy, it's because the people who write policy didn't do a good job, and the media doesn't explain it well, and kind of flip flop and back and forth. And I think most of the problems we have are fixable. The political issues are tough, but the actual policy could be fixed, but it'll never be fixed if you don't acknowledge there's a problem. If we don't acknowledge that our inner city schools are not doing a good job, we cannot fix it.
Do you agree with Elon that we'll one day have to pay people not to work?
- I think that's too far in the future. I think work gives you purpose, and I think there'll be plenty of work and play. I think people have more time for love and family and hiking and reading history and things, which are all great pleasures. I remind people of this AI world, you're still gonna have to do those things. Still have to make babies, you're still have to take care of 'em, you're still gonna have to eat, you're still gonna have to go for a hike, you're still gonna wanna go skiing, you're still gonna wanna love the arts and love the science and love just the knowledge. But purpose is a wonderful thing in life, and that's what pursuit of happiness is. It's like having a purpose that you're pursuing, whatever that purpose is. Done to be business, it could be art, it could be teaching, it could be media, educating people. So I think that purpose is a part. I think if people didn't have a purpose in life, that'd be really hard.
What's a piece of business advice you hear people give?
- Have a legacy.
- Where you'll be dead.
- Just do what you do really well, and then when you're gone, people say he or she made the world a better place as opposed to I've gotta come up with something unique and different so I can make a name for myself. I always say if a CEO says they have to have a legacy, sell the stock.
Jamie Diamond, thank you very much.
- Thank you.
- Appreciate it.